Thought Process
FLOTUS in Flux BY ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN ’10
Betty Boyd Caroli ’60 never set out to write about first ladies. A true Obie, she bristled at the idea of focusing on women who’d achieved renown only through marriage to a man. But decades ago, at the urging of an editor, she began digging into the policy battles, power dynamics, and public relations gambits that have marked this uniquely American institution for hundreds of years. She found enough gripping stories to fill several books, including a definitive history of first ladies whose fifth edition, First Ladies: The Ever Changing Role, from Martha Washington to Melania Trump, was released by Oxford University Press just before the pandemic hit. Now, with Jill Biden as the first first lady in U.S. history to hold an outside job and Doug Emhoff defining what it means to be the country’s first “second gentleman,” Caroli predicts more changes to come. Caroli jumped on the phone with Alice Miranda Ollstein ’10, a reporter for POLITICO, to talk about the Trumps, the Bidens, and why she hates the term “first gentleman” but believes we’ll have one soon. 12
ALICE OLLSTEIN: Oberlin is a place where students question many conventions, including marriage and gender. Did you bring that lens into your work, given that the White House is such a conventional and gendered place? BETTY BOYD CAROLI: For sure my education affected how I look at women’s roles. For instance, I always look to see what independence they had when they got to the marriage and how that developed during the marriage. My book on Lady Bird Johnson explores that quite a lot. When I first began my research, I found a definite pattern: almost all the women married down, they married men and into families less wealthy and well-educated than theirs. I could see why the men married up, but I really wanted to find out why the women married down.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE SLATINSKY
Q&A